Skew angle effect in shingled writing magnetic recording

Abstract In the shingled writing scheme the magnetization distribution at the track edge should be controlled to achieve high track densities. In particular, reducing the erase band width is necessary because of its large noise. The erase band width is determined in the writing process by both the head field gradient and SFD. In shingled writing, we can designate either side of the written track as the remaining side due to the progressive scan. In this work, erase band width reduction was accomplished by optimization of the skew. A track pitch decrease of 7% was measured due to skew angle control alone. Additionally, the track pitch improvement due to narrower erase bands was increased from 11 to 21% by narrowing the magnetic read width from 80 to 20 nm.